There is a need for cabinets that provide cabinet access to the internal portions of the cabinet to install or modify cable connections and to provide less obtrusive ways to ground the cabinet, as well as other features that provide efficiencies and conveniences.
High performance data center architects desire to utilize 10G SFP+ passive copper cabling to interconnect servers to switches due to its low latency, low power, and low cost as compared to competitive cabling alternatives such as, for example, copper 10G-Base-T or fiber 10G-Base-SR. However, when used in a passive manner, 10G SFP+ copper cabling has a length limitation of 7 meters, thereby limiting the number of network cabinets that can be ganged together and connected with 10G SFP+ cabling. Conventionally, when using 10G SFP+ cabling, switches and servers would have to be in the same network cabinet or, at most, in an immediately adjacent network cabinet.
Additionally, network architects have a desire to treat a network cabinet as a removable component. However, cabling extending between ganged together network cabinets extends through the network cabinets and must be disconnected from electrical components and pulled from a network cabinet prior to removal of the network cabinet. This is an extremely daunting task requiring significant time and makes it difficult for the architect to keep the disconnected cables organized for reconnection to a new network cabinet when replacing the removed network cabinet.